OCEANSIDE: Brother Benno's co-founder Kay Kutler dies

When Kay Kutler's husband first told her he wanted to start a
soup kitchen in downtown Oceanside, she was not a happy woman.

"She thought I was nuts," Harold Kutler said. "She dreamed about
when I retired, we'd travel."

That simple soup kitchen the Kutlers opened in a small house in
1983 grew to become
Brother Benno's,
a nonprofit all-volunteer
organization that provides food, clothing and shelter to thousands
of homeless children and adults each year.

And Kay Kutler was its angel, said Brother Benno's director
Denise Seymour.

Kutler, 77, died in her home Wednesday after having Parkinson's
disease for several years, her husband said.

"She touched so many hearts here because she was really among
the people," Seymour said. "Kay stood at the door and hugged every
single person that walked in that door every day for 25 years."

Fighting back tears as he spoke of his wife of 47 years, Harold
Kutler remembered how she embraced his dream of helping the
homeless and the poor.

"She came down the first thing we opened to be a dutiful wife.
She walked over to the first homeless guy there and hugged him. He
almost fainted," Kutler said. "She said to herself, 'I think this
is what God wanted me to do.' Over time, she gave out over 750,000
hugs."

Mayor Jim Wood said Kay Kutler was "a star in the
community."

"She's one of the sweetest people in the whole city, she and her
husband," Wood said. "I really will miss her and her
personality."

"I'll never forget in the early years, we went down there and
served food on Christmas Eve, and we took our kids and Kay would
get up and sing. It was incredible," Hatter said. "The woman was
amazing, just amazing."

Seymour said Kay Kutler just loved to sing at the dinners
Brother Benno's provided to those in need, and people missed her
singing when her illness made it no longer possible for her to
attend.

"She just loved to entertain and loved people," Seymour
said.

Kay Kutler was born in Grafton, N.D., the only child of Jim and
Alice Cayley, her husband wrote in a short biography he prepared as
a remembrance.

For a time, she went to a small one-room schoolhouse where one
teacher taught six grades, then transferred to Holy Angels, an
all-girls boarding school in Minneapolis.

She was chosen Potato Queen in the 1956 North Dakota State
Potato Queen Pageant, Harold Kutler wrote.

The couple met in 1962 when they both joined the Single
Catholics Over 23 Club in Long Beach.

When Harold Kutler retired from the vitamin business he founded
with his brother, he and Kay founded Brother Benno's Foundation and
named it after Brother Benno Garrity, who was a Benedictine monk
and chief baker at the Prince of Peace Abbey in Oceanside.

Brother would drive through poor neighborhoods handing out
loaves of bread, and the Kutler's got the monk's permission to name
their soup kitchen after him.